Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  A week afterwards in the hospital they told me Lord Beden was dead.

  He had fallen on a large piece of scrap-iron by the roadside, and nearly every bone in his body had been broken. I myself had had a miraculous escape by falling into a thick clump of gorse, and had got off with a broken arm and dislocated collar-bone, but I was not able to get about for two months. I said nothing of what had happened, and the accident required but little explanation. Motor-car accidents are common enough, especially on slopes like that of the Stour Valley.

  When I was able to get about, however, I visited the scene of the disaster. A friend of mine, one of the doctors at the County Lunatic Asylum, called for me and drove me over to the place. The smash had occurred nearly half-way down the hillside, close to a ruined shed. The ground was covered with gorse and bracken, but here and there huge pieces of rusty iron were scattered about. Some of them were sharp and brown and ugly, but many were overgrown with creeping convolvulus. They looked as if they had once been parts of some great machine.

  “A curious coincidence,” said my companion, as we drove away from the place.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have been told,” he continued, “that thirty years ago this old shed was used by the late Earl’s elder brother. He was a mechanical genius, and they say that his efforts to work out some particular invention in a practical form drove him off his head. He was allowed to have this place as a workshop, and, under the supervision of two keepers, worked on his invention till the day of his death. It was thought that perhaps he would recover his reason if he ever accomplished the task. But in some mysterious way his plans were stolen from him no fewer than three times, and after the third time the poor fellow lost heart and destroyed himself. I have heard it whispered by one of my colleagues up yonder that the late Earl was not altogether ignorant of these thefts, but this is probably only gossip. All the fragments of iron you saw lying about were parts of the machine. Heaven knows what it was.”

  I did not venture any suggestion on this point, but I think I could have done so.

  Monsters and

  Horrors

  The expression on its face leaves no doubt that this prehistoric leftover knows the jig is up as military regulars zero their artillery piece in on The Monster of Lake LaMetrie written by Wardon Allan Curtis for Pearson’s Magazine, September I899. Stanley L. Wood, the artist, would prove one the outstanding science fiction illustrators of his time.

  Pearsons Magazine

  March, 1908

  THE DEATH-TRAP

  by George Daulton

  THE DEATH-TRAP by George Daulton is a classic study of horror in science fiction. The monster is a tangible entity and truly exists. His haunts, the sewers of Chicago, provide psychological preparation for something abominable and foul. What makes the story come alive from the hundreds of other monster tales is the immensely powerful Irish police officer, who cannot accept the fact that there are some things that he cannot defeat by physical strength. The hunt for the monster becomes a matter of heroic folly for him, in sharp contrast to his companions who force themselves, against the dictates of their fears, into the hunt.

  This is also a modern horror story. Its monster arises from the dankness and filth of a city’s waste. It anticipates the methods of later writers who attempted to conjure ghosts from the smoke and industrial ash of today’s industrial complex (Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber, Unknown Worlds, October 1941); and a danger from half-human things in the subways of New York (Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson, Weird Tales, June-July 1939).

  George Daulton, who shows such great literary know-how here, has but one hardcover book to his credit, a non-fantasy titled The Helter Skelters (F. A. Stokes, 1909). He made no great impact upon the literary world. However, The Death-Trap, published initially in Pearson’s Magazine, March 1908, and reprinted in The Witch’s Tales, December 1936, deserves to be preserved by inclusion here.

  A CAB had not been to my fancy that night. As I left the club I really had nothing to complain of, for I had not been unsuccessful; but I felt sick with something akin to remorse. The game had been of the right sort, among men who were close friends and all able to pay a good sum for a night’s amusement; there had been high stakes, but no ugly action in the bets, though the cards ran snappy and full of surprises; a lounging, friendly game, with no litter of discarded packs on the floor, for we all liked a seasoned deck when the cards began to run naturally into flushes and fulls. My remorse was perhaps a reaction from a surfeit of pleasure, and a longing to turn myself to something more satisfying than killing time. I decided to walk home, though it was two o’clock; I needed the thirty minutes’ sharp exercise to pump the fumes of smoke and wine out of me in the invigorating lake air.

  But my depression was not relieved, when having passed the open front of the city’s heart, the stately wall of granite buildings stopped, and Michigan Avenue, without electricity, plunged on between grimy wholesale houses in a black sweep dimly defined by a few gaslights.

  Hesitating there under the gigantic lamps of the library, the loneliness of the gloomy streets made me think better of a cab. I remembered the hold-ups so common in Chicago during the late fall, and a number of mysterious disappearances that had kept the whole city in dread of the unfrequented business districts at night. There were no cab lamps in sight up Randolph Street, and none nearer down Michigan than those I had passed at the Athletic Club. So I went on into the gloom, not wishing to appear daunted even to myself, though I knew it was not safe at that hour for a man alone and in evening dress to cross the river through that deserted street.

  But the black dog was on my shoulder. My sense of folly became a dread and helpless loneliness, at once so great that I greeted the odors of sugar, coffee and tobacco that issued from the black solitudes of the great business houses as pleasant and safe company that stood for the comfortable human affairs of the broad, honest day. The empty chasm of the narrowed street echoed to my nervous footfalls; otherwise it was so silent that the sleepless growl of the surrounding streets made its loneliness all the more pronounced.

  I am almost ashamed to tell—even now that I know that I must have experienced one of those strange premonitions of danger that sometimes forewarn us—how I rushed away from my fear more than from that which I feared.

  When I had but a block more to go before reaching the Rush Street drawbridge, a small, thick-set man lurched out of Water Street from the direction of Randolph Station. I saw him pass under the corner lamp as plainly as I ever saw anything under similar conditions—I was alert for just such an encounter. The man had fallen into himself and was weaving his way over a good breadth of the pavement, and added to his drunken reel I thought I saw the sailor in the swaying of his shoulders.

  We met on the corner, or rather, he stopped before the inlet of the sewer, while I was on the curb above him. I was so close to him I saw a look in his blood-shot eyes challenging the very idea that he was drunk.

  I had no time to feel relieved. I saw the glance, I saw it; but with it on the instant came a black, lightning-like flicker out of the granite pavement on which we stood, as though the tongue of a monstrous serpent gave one devilish, wavering lick that encircled the man and dashed him down the mouth of the sewer—a clot of thin mud spattered my cheek —and the drunken sailor had vanished.

  The shock of it made me leap and tremble, and horror struck me cold in the pit of the stomach, while waves of it rolled out over my body like the rings on smitten water—I must have been demented for the moment, else I should have fled my own immediate danger. There had been no sound of breaking bones upon the stony jaws of the sewer; but at that instant some sudden up-starting of night traffic had barked loudly round the corner of a by-street and may have drowned the thud. To the eye it had been as though the man had been blown away by an explosion —one instant there, bestial in his human bulk, the next scuttled, annihilated.

  I do not know what I did just after the shock. It seems to me, in recall
ing my distraught fancies, that I heard the “whimper” of that passing soul and saw it curl upward in a thin mist, like the breath from a foul maw. When I came to I was crouching on the stones looking down the black gullet of the drain. There was nothing to be seen in its capacious mouth; but the brown, greasy sweat of traffic that glistened everywhere upon the paving was plainly wiped from the granite lips of the sewer, and with this as evidence of the reality of what I had seen I awoke to the hideous peril of that death-trap. I sprang up and backed away, then turned and fled up the street.

  Coming out of that accursed and forsaken strip of the avenue was like escaping from a den of murderers to the shelter of a friendly home. The great bridge was rumbling on its cogs and sweeping majestically through arc-lit volumes of smoke and steam to let some sluggish freighter of the lakes trail by. I ran over the slippery pavement of the approach and leaped upon the last yard of the bridge as it swung out over the river.

  I felt the unspeakable relief of escape, but I did not stop until I had crossed over the two roadways, though the bridge was still moving. How kindly powerful and humanly helpful the huge truss seemed as it widened the gulf between me and the South Side abutment, where I fancied the flickering phantom was licking over the water toward me! How good it was to hear the business-like breath of the tug, the sob of the steam imprisoned in the passing monster! The firm command and sensible response of bells and obedient feet upon the decks—all the worthiness of the grimy labor of honest men I joyfully greeted with noble comparisons, while the prosy tug and stupid barge seemed to sweep by me as stately as a classic chorus.

  The bridge was beginning slowly to follow the retreating stern of the vessel when I became aware that I was not alone on the footway. Perhaps the smoke and steam had at first concealed the man, or in my excitement I had overlooked him; at any rate he was at my elbow before I knew it, giving my overwrought nerves such a shock that my first impulse was to fly at him like a savage dog. But the changing shadows of the bridge just then allowed the white light of an arc-lamp to fall upon his face, which was strangely sad and refined and certainly friendly.

  “Sir,” said the man, with quaint politeness and solemnity, “I see you are ill. Will you accept a restorative? A Special Reserve that I can recommend.”

  With a grace that at once gave me confidence he proffered a flask handsome enough for the traveling companion of a king.

  “You have had a shock,” he observed, as I thanked him, “a shock that might prostrate any man. I saw you fly panic-stricken out of the mouth of Michigan Avenue, and caught the change of relief that came over you as you gained the draw and your white face was swept away from the glare of the shore lamp. Nevertheless I believe I knew you from that glance. ‘Now here is a man to depend on,’ thought I; ‘one to face and fight to the last, when the dread mystery that has sent him into a panic becomes a reality that may be reached.’ Such was my own case, and—since I am persuaded that we have been brought together for death or life—you will see that I shall not flinch when the test comes.”

  I searched the man’s face. Had fate played that night with my life and reason only to finish me on the bridge with a madman? He seemed to read my thought, and denied it with a sad smile which added charm to the grace that had given me confidence.

  “Why, you yourself will say to-morrow,” he pursued with renewed assurance, “ ‘Is it not passing strange that we two men of all Chicago should have met?’ But I believe there is no chance. What we call chance only seems so, and I mean no irreverence when I say that the Almighty, playing his great solemn game of solitaire through the ages, intended that we should rid the world of that dreadful thing that flickers out of the pavements at night and makes a death-trap of the sewer.”

  “That black flicker of death out of the sewer!” I cried, starting up from the bridge rail. “What do you mean, sir—merciful heaven! What do you mean? Have you, too, seen it?”

  “I have seen it, too,” he returned with intense feeling, and I thought the light of relief that he had made no mistake shone in his eyes. “Now, is it not strange that we should have met? I ran out of that street one night myself, more unmanned with terror, I doubt not, than you; I, too, had seen a human being, a life perhaps more worthy than my own, scooped down the gutter sewer like a truss of hay drawn through a mow door.”

  The stranger paused and with apologetic courtesy drew my attention to a clot of thin mud staining my shirt front, which to me seemed as gruesome as a gout of blood.

  “Chicago streets gleamed underfoot just as they do to-night,” he mused. “Down here in these granite gulches nature’s sweet dew is befouled by the young giant wallowing in the madness of his toil, and with some of this oily smear of the streets the black deed bespattered my face, too, and my clothing. Since that night I have been fascinated by the incredible horror of what I saw, and I have haunted the streets that I might find it; tempting the fiend, if possible, to an attack and a fight to the death. But now you have seen it—I beg of you, tell me what you saw!”

  “I had an unnatural and overpowering sense of depression and foreboding as I came up the avenue,” I responded, as if that was an inseparable part of what I had seen. My companion acknowledged it with a nod of understanding, and verified each horrid detail of my story as I told it to him.

  “God alone knows how many have gone that way,” said the stranger solemnly when I had finished. “Unseen and unfriended, how should they be reported? But the city rang with the one I saw. Water Street, you say? Mine was at Lake, but a block away. They are never far from the river, which at night gives an unfrequented district for the murderer’s work.”

  “Why didn’t you report this to the police!” I exclaimed. “We must lose no more time in this way, but do it at once.”

  “No; by no means,” objected my companion, “consider the incredible story we have to tell. Do you want to be listened to with insolent indulgence for a swell that has taken a bit too much? Very likely you would be received with cold doubt, or even suspicion; I have known men to be clapped into the sweat-box who brought their information to the authorities as innocently as you would. Your introduction at the sergeant’s desk would be like an arraignment, and perhaps for weeks you would be kept under a mild surveillance. Do you want to be the tool of Pinkerton, when you can be a free lance? Do you want the thousand and one questions and comments of friends, the common notoriety of the papers, the interviews and headlines and pictures, when you can quietly perform this sacred duty as a gentleman and at the same time, even in this most modern city, have an adventure prodigious as those of the sagas?”

  “What is the hazard that you have in mind?” I demanded, and, strange to say, I felt my nerves refresh as the world-old thirst of men for the chancing life against great odds in a dangerous mystery tempted me. “This business is too wild and dangerous for a man of affairs to undertake upon a chance meeting and its premonitions.”

  The strange man stopped me with his lifted hand.

  “My dear sir,” he said with quiet decision, “though I did say I thought we had been brought together for a determined purpose, I haven’t asked you to go—nor to take any risks.”

  “But I want to!” I flung out. The words came almost against my will.

  “Ah, well, if you want to, that is another thing,” responded my companion with satisfaction, and with that his manner changed. He was still quaint and fanciful, but something of reserve power became apparent, his whole being knit itself together and somehow I felt myself included in the effect. The spirit of the hunt took possession of him.

  “But what more foolhardy thing could a man do than to go into the sewer after this murderer?—for that is what we shall have to do,” I exclaimed with some irritation at my own determination to do it. “Perhaps that is the reason it lures me; at any rate I am going to follow you, taking your integrity for granted.”

  “I took you from the first, as you have accepted me,” returned my comrade, and, if I may say it, even there, in the gloom of th
e bridge, I felt the gentlemanliness of the man flow over me, and yet I can mention nothing more of it than the endearing confidence of his smile. Then our hands gripped, and it was done—each knew without saying that the word passed for life or death.

  “My family name,” he resumed, “is known round the world; but until this business is transacted I hope you will be satisfied to call me ‘Hood.’ Most men of my station, who wish to be men in spite of their wealth, plunge into money-getting, or enter politics; they explore Africa or the Amazon; they lose themselves in Tibet or the South Seas, or even take to mountain climbing.

  “Now I seek to be the exponent of the dark and terrible in human passion, the apologist of the degenerate and gruesome. I pondered one day upon the moral condition of the slaughterer with a knife, as I stood on the Halsted Street bridge and heard the dying screams of the swine, and saw their limp carcasses continuously passing before the upper windows of a packing house. The following week I became a pig-sticker at the Stock Yards, and read my subject to a conclusion. To-night you find me an embalmer.”

  I am glad to say, unnatural as it may seem, that it was not because the hag-ridden night could add no more of horror that I did not fly from him in fear and loathing; but truly the charm of the man’s gentleness seemed heightened by his strange confession, and, more convincing still, he gave me the feeling that he put his soul in my place and in the same fullness admitted mine to the motives of his own, as I have never known any other human being to do. I cleaved to him then, as I have ever since, in the most perfect friendship a man ever had.

  “There are some who would say that such gruesome affairs have tempted me to my ruin, as drink or drugs do many men,” he mused sadly. “I cannot deny that I have made it too much the book and the lamp in my life; I love it and loathe it as the drunkard does the drink; but while I am in it I am not of it.”